London 2012 Olympics: who should it be? Mandela or wizard? The candidates to light the flame are many

With the Opening Ceremony a week away, the conundrum drives the nerves into
such a frenzy that there may not be enough tranquillisers in all the Big
Pharma depots on earth.

In training? Sir Steve Redgrave, at Henley earlier this month, is favourite to light the Olympic cauldron.Photo: GETTY IMAGES

By Matthew Norman

7:00AM BST 20 Jul 2012

When Danny Boyle’s extravaganza reaches its juddering climax, patriots ask each other in anguished mystification, who shall light the Olympic cauldron?

For an aeon the torch has made its languid journey towards Stratford, guided on its path by such home grown paradigms of the Olympic dream as the steel plutocrat Lakshmi Mittal, and still we haven’t a clue who will deliver the coup de grace.

The guesswork veers wildly between the sensible and facetious. In a Huffington Post online poll, for instance, the options include David Beckham, Sebastian Coe, Daniel Craig as 007, Steve Redgrave, Margaret Thatcher, Roger Bannister, Albus Dumbledore (“it is a cauldron after all”, as the poll’s blurb usefully reminds), and Kelly Holmes.

Sir Steve, with almost a quarter of votes, is currently a few oar’s lengths clear of Dumbledore, with Bannister looking good for the bronze.

But as anyone with Lasse Viren’s endurance power will learn in the final paragraph – and let’s be brutally frank, this column is always a marathon, not a sprint – I cast my vote for “Other” with a different candidate in mind.

Before we limp to the line, let the obvious be stated. But for the requirement that the igniter be a British Olympian, it would have to be Nelson Mandela. Apart from being the Greatest Living Human, he has an amazingly wide-ranging sporting pedigree.

In recent days alone, two athletes have cited him an inspirational force. Golfing journalists were stunned to find Tiger Woods impersonating a thoughtful non-narcissist when recalling a visit to his Pretoria home at a pre-Open press conference.

“He has such a presence and aura about him, unlike anyone I’ve met,” said Tiger on the day Mandela turned 94. “He has meant so much to so many people around the world, not just in South Africa.”

Anyone capable of humanising Woods, however briefly, must be some kind of sporting god.

More relevant in an Olympic context was an account from Caster Semenya, the South African denied not just the gold medal but her lap of honour after winning the 800 metres at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.

There was no suspicion of doping when thrice the average amount of testosterone for a female was found in her body.

She was born with a more ambiguous gender than most of us, and shamefully treated as a result. Imagine the outcry were a male British athlete with outsize moobs stigmatised like that for having too much oestrogen.

When Semenya returned from Berlin, the Father of the Nation did his stuff. “I believe in you,” he told the then teenager. “Go out there and make me proud.” So she will, touch wood, in the days ahead.

Yet Mandela’s sporting credentials extend beyond that, and even than the “Rainbow Nation” pitch appearance in his Springbok shirt after South Africa won the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

As a young man, he was a useful amateur heavyweight, though unlike another beloved African leader, Idi Amin, he never won a national boxing title.

What he did do is crystallise the Olympic ideal almost as perfectly as the vision of Mr Mittal bearing the torch.

“Sport has the power to change the world,” Mandela once said, “the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.”

If that quote alone establishes him as the ideal lighter of a cauldron which represents Olympic idealism, rules is rules. Apparently, it must be a British gold medallist, the only question being which.

Much as one reveres Sirs Steve and Roger, and Dame Kelly, not to mention his lordship himself, here is a golden chance for Coe to prove yet again what a big hearted, unegotistical ermine-wearer he is.

Where he would be excused for choosing Sebastian Coe as reward for the years of tireless effort, what a statement of Mandela-esque selflessness, egalitarianism, forgiveness and reconciliation it would be if the great Olympian he invited to light the cauldron were neither his noble self nor any of his titled chums, but plain Mr Steve Ovett.